SEOs are mostly considered hard skills especially, technical SEOs. In order to excel even as an SEO practitioner there are certain soft skills that must be possessed in order to do well and excel as an SEO practitioner.
Definition of soft skills
Soft skills could be defined as the abilities that allow a person to communicate and work with others effectively and harmoniously.
Irrespective of your position within an organisation, including such roles as SEO expert, there are soft skills that you need to help you navigate any work environment and process. All work environments include working with people and stakeholders including SEO roles.
If you are a manager of the SEO division of your organisation, You would be required to work with humans at all levels of the organisation especially top management and technical staff.
In this article I share top five softs that any AEO manager requires to excel in his/her role.
Best Five soft skills for an SEO Manager succeed
Also read: Get Seen on Google: Top Winning SEO Strategy
- Compassion
A compassionate individual senses other people’s emotions, and also has the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. According to recent research, empathy is the most important skill in leadership. However, it is necessary to contextualize how soft skills relate to SEO management.
Generally, compassion as the number one skill for executives given that it helps you build better, more meaningful relationships with and a good understanding of the people you work with. In relation to marketing and especially SEO, compassion is essential for you to work across several different functions and engage with a different stakeholders regularly. In order to succeed in engaging colleagues and resolving conflict, improves productivity, collaboration and drives better results you need a good doze of compassion.
In order to improve compassion, do a self-audit in order to deal with your own biases and how you interact with the people around you. It is important to take active steps to be more considerate and empathetic in dealing with others, always trying to put yourself in others shoes.
- Critical thinking
This could be defined as the ability to be objective, unbiased in analysis and evaluation of available facts, in order to form a judgment. Critical thinking is relevant in all fields including marketing as it enable individuals to act unbiasedly, let the data speak and add more value to organisations.
You need to always dig deeper and don’t take anything at phase value. Choose to question every assumption and practice thorough analysis and use logic and facts to make decisions all the time. Question not just information, but also the sources of information and assumptions and guides used to collect certain data. In order to be a good critical thinker, it requires time and consistent practice. As a marketing and SEO manager, critical thinking will give you the edge to analyse SEO data, assumptions, and more
- Be a Proactive listener
The skill of proactive or active listening entails that you intentionally listen to whoever is speaking to you. It requires you to focus and get what is being communicated and to listen with the objective to fully grasp what the speaker is sharing with you.
It is a fundamental skill in the development of other soft skills such as critical thinking and compassion. It is crucial to understand that there is a difference between listening and understanding what is being communicated. Intentional listening, requires more than just absorbing the words being said.
In order to improve your intentional listening skills, you need to be more conscious and more present when someone is talking to you. Choose to create mental notes of the conversation. Intentional listening will assist you to understand your stakeholders, team members and leadership better, and set the foundation to our next soft skill.
- Clear communication
In order to communicate clearly, you need to effectively use verbal and non-verbal communication in order to successfully exchange and explain thoughts and ideas. The goal of the communicator is to make sure that the content communicated is fully understood by their audience.
Clear communication is not to convince someone about your truth. It’s to help others understand the intended message. The reason why this is important to emphasize is because we often think that if someone rejects our idea, we haven’t communicated our proposition clearly. While that is a possibility, this is not a correlation..
You need to have a good understanding of your audience and their needs, the use of the right language and examples, and a clear message. You can further improve this by actively seeking and listening to feedback from your audience and improve your communication skills accordingly.
- Storytelling
Storytelling could be defined as the act of sharing a story. For example, we share our personal stories such as memorable events from our lives. Something we’ve seen, heard or experienced. We also share stories about what we aspire to achieve, or around something we fear. Stories help us make sense of the world, and it lets us share information in a way that creates emotional connections.
But why did I include storytelling on this list, if we all know how to do it? Well, it’s because we also need to learn how to use it in the workplace in order to achieve success.
Let’s break this down. Stories help us make sense of the world, which means a story could help communicate a clear message even about the most complex subject. So, if you want your non-SEO audience to understand the difference between crawling and indexation, you can tell an analogy about how search engines are like librarians and the database behind a search engine is like a library. Analogies are a great form of storytelling to help explain unfamiliar things with something familiar.
Stories also help build emotional connections, so using them in business can help you create trust with stakeholders and leadership, which is essential to get buy-in and achieve success.
Conclusion
In relation to SEO, developing these top five soft skills will assist you be more successful in the following:
- Building an excellent relationships with different stakeholders, as well as better-functioning teams.
- You become a great presenter to and getting buy-in from leadership.
- Your productivity rises in cross-functional projects.
- Deeper, and more factual, understandings of Google algorithms for non-SEOs.
- Improving your understanding of “the big picture”, and high-level connections between SEO and other business functions.
Building your soft skills can be challenging, and it is an on-going process. It takes practice and consistency and — just like SEO — it’s never fully accomplished. It’s a mindset that inspires to do the work day-to-day and motivates to continuously develop your skill set.